Broadcast network content or programming is commonly provided in conjunction with associated informational content or assets. These assets include advertisements, associated programming, public-service announcements, ad tags, trailers, weather or emergency notifications and a variety of other content, including paid and unpaid content. In this regard, assets providers (e.g., advertisers) who wish to convey information (e.g., advertisements) regarding services and/or products to users of the broadcast network often pay for the right to insert their information into programming of the broadcast network. For instance, advertisers may provide ad content to a network operator such that the ad content may be interleaved with broadcast network programming during one or more programming breaks. The delivery of such paid assets often subsidizes or covers the costs of the programming provided by the broadcast network. This may reduce or eliminate costs borne by the users of the broadcast network programming.
In order to achieve a better return on their investment, asset providers often try to target their assets to a selected audience that is believed to be interested in the goods or services of the asset provider. The case of advertisers on a cable television network is illustrative. For instance, an advertiser or a cable television network may target its ads to certain demographic groups based on, for example, geographic location, gender, age, income etc. Accordingly, once an advertiser has created an ad that is targeted to a desired group of viewers (e.g., targeted group) the advertiser may attempt to procure insertion times in the network programming when the targeted group is expected to be among the audience of the network programming.
Various asset targeting systems have been proposed in the context of targeting ads to individual network users in a cable television network. In one implementation, the asset targeting system is capable of determining classification parameters of a current viewer. Specifically, the system analyzes a click stream (remote control or other inputs) from the user and, optionally, other information to determine demographic or other information regarding the current user. This information can be utilized by a user equipment device (e.g., set top box) to identify appropriate ads for an upcoming commercial spot in a process called voting. In such an arrangement, one or more user equipment devices may report current user information to a network platform such that ads better targeted to current network users may be selected for broadcast. Additionally, this information can be used to select an appropriate ad, from a set of ads available for a given commercial spot, to be delivered at a set top box (“STB”). The ads that are actually delivered at the STB television can be reported to the network.